CSE498 Collaboration with Mozilla Firefox

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By golly, we’re getting somewhere…

Well, the day started out with another abandon-my-attempt-at-implementing-something-because-it-already-got-it-taken-care-of-without-me moment, but beyond that, I was happy with my contributions today.

A scaling screenshot on pinch-to-zoom has been implemented (no thanks to myself), but for some absolutely insane reason, sometimes that screenshot gets drawn over the webpage’s content, sometimes not (although you can see animation through the “holes” of a webpage where they put advertisement boxes). Michigan State’s website scales fine, mxr.mozilla.org scales fine, Yahoo! sometimes scales fine DEPENDING ON WHICH CURRENT EVENT STORY IS CURRENTLY BEING DISPLAYED!!!, and then there’s websites that don’t hide the content and cover up the animation, like Amazon and Google and our CSE498 page on Michigan State’s website. Weird, I know.

But anyway, back to what I did. Figuring out some algorithms for x- and y- offset, I was able to get zooming relative to the center of the screen (adjusting for scrolling) instead of from the top-left corner. Plus I also got the animation to slow down when getting above or below a maximum or minimum zoom threshold (like it’s offering resistance), then snap back to that minimum or maximum once the gesture terminates. And the individual tabs keep track of their own zoom scale when you switch back and forth between tabs, which was causing a lot of jumping earlier.

Still got a lot of problems to work out – there’s some initial flickering when the screenshot is being created, sometimes it’s not perfectly lined up, we should probably center the zoom on the cursor rather than the screen’s center, and oh yeah – it doesn’t work at all on some websites, but we’re making progress nonetheless.

On the schedule for CSE498 tomorrow – sit back and relax while the final 3 groups give their project plan presentations while being glad that we already did ours a week ago. Maybe I should bring some popcorn to class or something…